Paper short abstract:

Following the afterlife of accidental deaths in Mumbai's commuter railways, this paper unravels their socio-material geography and micropolitics of death care - from emotional management of trauma, to material management of bodies, to the ethical burden of ensuring appropriate passage.

Paper long abstract:

Plying 7.5 million commuters daily over 400 km of track length, Mumbai Suburban Railway (MSR) is the world's busiest mass transit system. With an annual average of 3401 deaths and 3473 injuries along its lines, it is also the world's deadliest. The paper draws attention to the fact that nearly a third of the total number of people who die in Mumbai's human accidents remain untraced. This social and spatial geography of death in mobility thus bears imprints of the city's macroprocesses of labour and capital circulation that embed the city in trans-regional migratory circuits. Within the different institutions that are linked through these deaths, such as the police stations, mortuaries and public burial and cremation facilities, this produces the material effect of 'overcrowding and delay' and continuous logistical manoeuvre for accomplishing disposal of accumulating bodies amidst severe constraints of resources - money, time, labour, infrastructure and land.

Bereft of immediate social relations in the moment of departure, these deaths also posit the agents of death care in legal as well as emotional and subjective states vis a vis their 'guardianship'. This paper remains attentive to the articulations of these agents as they evaluate the differential social circumstances that frame each instance of death and perform mediatory roles by mobilising their own values, judgment, emotion, biases as well as tact and pragmatic discretions. The human accident opens a window for examining the care politics of various such 'relation-less' deaths in the city.